Young People Feel Nostalgia for an Analog Past They Never Knew

60% of Gen Z wish they could return to a time before everybody was ‘plugged in'

I knew a grad student at Oxford who lived in the past—but in the most charming way. If you spent an hour with him, you started wishing you could live in the past too.

He dressed like an Oxford student from a hundred years before. Where did he find those outfits? They looked like theatrical costumes. He was a character from Downton Abbey brought to life.

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Stiff, starched collars had gone out of fashion in the 1930s, but he wore them with pride. His choice of fabrics and cuts of clothes were similarly retro. And he adapted to the seasons—in the spring, for example, he could be seen wearing a traditional straw boater hat, which had been the height of casual fashion at Oxford in 1900.

For all I could tell, he thought it still was 1900.

Did people ever really go boating in this attire?

His language and demeanor were similarly old school—even his sentences were Dickensian and his witticisms straight out of Oscar Wilde. He must have put great care in constructing this persona. You felt like he had just come out of a time machine from the past.

I once heard another student ask him if he had ever seen a talking movie. That was the reaction he inspired.

We all made jokes about him. But we secretly admired him, too.